Broadcasting Telecasting (Oct-Dec 1957)

OPINION CONTINUED selling point. With radio, a dealer can ask for the order every day, several times a day, right in his own selling area. And he can do it at far less cost than any other medium. It is true that our more successful dealers do have a definite advertising program working for them in their local markets, and it shows up in their operation. . . . But the fact remains that the biggest majority of dealers, Dodge and competitive dealers alike, do little or nothing in the way of retail advertising. . . . You are the advertising expert — not the dealer. You must conceive the basic selling idea, create the copy platform, plan the overall strategy. If you wait for the dealer to do it, you may have a long wait. And remember, if there is anything we can do from the factory end to make your selling job to dealers easier and more effec tive don't hesitate to let us know. We realize how important local advertising is to us and to our dealers. We recognize the role radio and television played in Dodge's success last year — both on the national and the local level. And, as we once again re-evaluate our money, our markets and our media for the coming year, we expect radio and tv to again assume leading roles. PLAYBACK QUOTES WORTH REPEATING TV TO LEGITIMATE DRAMA Does a "hit" on Madison Avenue guarantee success on Broadway? While some tv scriptwriters, such as Arnold Shuhnan, Paddy Chayefsky and Gore Vidal, have made the transition happily with hits in both media, most broadcast dramatists fail. In his new book, out this month, New York playwright-drama critic-author Walter (How Not to Write a Play) Kerr, tells why. The book is titled Pieces at Eight (Simon & Schuster, N. Y '., 244 pp., $3.95). ... A television play is normally at its most active, the camera at its most mobile, during the early stages of the game. As the story moves forward, it tends to narrow in focus. The first thing you know you're dealing only with a face or two, and you're watching closely for the bat of an eyelash, the twist of a lip, the significant quiver that suggests an otherwise unelaborated change of heart. When the moment of crisis does come, it's not much more than a shadow across a man's face. From a theatrical point of view, the best television plays seem to shrink to a climax. The theatre, of course, works the other way around. An audience doesn't resist a lazy opening: that familiar maid ambling slowly to that familiar telephone won't be dialed out. . . . The stage is normally at its most expansive, its most full-bodied, in the last 20 minutes, and anyone whose responses are theatrically trained is apt to feel decidedly cheated by the closing moments of a regulation television play. In other words, the man who writes for television is building to a grace note at the same time that the traditional dramatist is trying to strike a chord. The two forms tend to move in precisely contrary directions, the one dropping to a sigh while the other is taking its biggest breath, the one diminishing to a pinpointed epilogue while the other is winding up for an all-out Act III. (If I had to boil this down to a phrase, I guess I'd just say that television writers don't write third acts.) The playwright who wants to live in both worlds, then, is obviously going to have to equip himself with reversible gears. It should be possible. The biggest mistakes to date haven't come from the grinding clatter of gears being stripped but from the failure to try for any real change of course; too many tv men have simply placed their habitual, quietly "untheatrical" formula on the stage. A COSTLY PUBLIC FUTILITY Citing the deficit and debt reported in the current annual financial statement of the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., the trade publication Canadian Broadcaster & Telescreen suggests, "Let's close up this government circus." ... A plan could be easily evolved under which the CBC could step out of the business of physical broadcasting, turn over its facilities to private interests at their depreciated value or more, and, in return be given, or sold at a reasonable price, air time for the broadcasting on private radio and television stations of those of its programs which cannot be supplied by the private broadcasters and which are of truly national value. This phase of broadcasting comes under the heading of public utility and we believe it might well continue as public enterprise. But the light entertainment, the news and the music of a popular nature are well dispensed by the private stations, and the entry of the government into this field is in no sense a public utility. In fact, it is nothing short of a highly costly public futility. RIPPLES FROM TV NEWS Describing the unique impact of tv news to an Air Force Seminar in New York Oct. 11 [At Deadline, Oct. 14], CBS News Director John F. Day cited recent instances of the medium's effectiveness. Impact is the word to be most associated with television reporting. One can use hundreds of words to describe the expressions on the faces of the members of a mob kicking a Negro reporter in front of Central High School in Little Rock, but a one-minute film story — properly scripted, properly narrated and properly integrated into the show — projects the viewer into the very section and tells the story with impact no other medium can muster. Nothing I can think of demonstrated the impact of tv, and particularly that of tv news, more forcefully than did the Khrushchev interview last June. The Russian leader had been interviewed before. Turner Catledge of the New York Times had interviewed him only a few weeks prior to our telecast. But this interview, printed in the New York Times and carried in lesser detail by all the wire services, caused hardly a ripple in the country. On the other hand, when Khrushchev appeared before a panel of reporters on screens in homes across the country, his words and actions became an international incident. Newspapers blazoned the story the next day. Members of Congress had comments. The President devoted time to it in his next news conference. The telecast was repeated in countries throughout the world. And in every one of them, it caused the same sort of excitement. Why? Because words describing this man could not carry the impact of the man himself — and on television people saw the man himself. MISPLACED SENSE OF GUILT The New York Times in its "Topic of the Times" column has this to say of the steady television viewer. Watching television hour after hour is by now a well established habit, not infrequently accompanied by a guilty feeling. Many a viewer considers television a waste of time, yet keeps on watching it. Why should there be such a feeling? Is it not that television introduces us to many interesting people, interesting because of their actions or utterances? Would anyone on either side of the Atlantic dispute the fact that television could and should be, and often is, an opportunity to extend our knowledge and experience? What youngster, and adult too, should not have the opportunity to watch the United Nations General Assembly, or see and hear some of the foremost men of culture and science, politics and the arts in the comfort of his home? None, the way we see it. Page 140 • October 21, 1957 Broadcasting